In Albert Camus’ The Stranger, the protagonist, Meursault, rejects social conventions and morals, living in the present without regard for emotions and religion. Because of this attitude, he is not understood at his trial and is ultimately marginalized as a stranger and sentenced to death.
Introduction
Albert Camus’s The Stranger is a mesmerizing story of the glorious Mediterranean sunshine and the man who basks in it day after day. It is the novel that catapulted Camus from a young, unknown writer to a Nobel Prize winner, and it is arguably the work that firmly established him in the literary world. Since its publication, The Stranger has never left the French bestseller lists and has been praised for its deep exploration of the human psyche and the absurdities of society, as well as its search for a new ethic, making it one of the most iconic works of 20th-century French literature.
In this article, we’ll take a look at Camus’ life, the characters, and the plot of The Stranger, and explore how Camus’ ideas are reflected in this work. In doing so, we’ll be able to reflect on the significance of The Stranger.
Camus’s life
The life of an author is crucial to understanding a work of literature, as the author’s background and significant events in his or her life shape the thinking that is embedded in the work. It is also important because the people around the author often form the basis for the characters in the work.
Albert Camus was born on November 7, 1913, in Mondovi, Algeria, the second of nine siblings. His father was a vineyard worker who was drafted into the war and killed in action, leaving Camus to grow up in poverty with his mother and grandmother, who worked as a housekeeper. However, he was nurtured by his teachers at school, where he showed great talent and was selected as a scholarship student, giving him the opportunity to attend university. While enrolled in the philosophy department at the University of Algiers, he worked several jobs to support himself, but it was during this time that he opened his eyes to the world of creativity and met Jean Grenier, who became his intellectual mentor. In 1934, he joined the Communist Party at the urging of Jean Grenier, but left after experiencing internal conflicts. He tried to become a professor but was unable to take the teaching exams due to health problems. During World War II, he served as editor-in-chief of the French resistance journal Combat.
In 1942, he began to gain fame with the publication of ‘The Stranger’ and the essay ‘The Sisyphean Myth’, and also found success as a playwright with his play ‘Caligula’. In 1947, he published The Plague, which he had been working on for seven years, and which became an instant sensation and won Camus the Critics’ Prize. In the 1950s, he devoted himself to the human rights movement, particularly against the death penalty, and in 1957 he published Reflections on the Death Penalty with Arthur Kössler, founder of the Society Against the Death Penalty. That same year, at the young age of forty-four, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. In April 1960, Camus, who had said in his youth that “the most wrong way to die is to die in an automobile accident,” ironically lost his life in a car accident while traveling to Paris with Michel Gallimard.
Camus’s impoverished childhood, his philosophical studies at university, and his encounter with Jean Grenier would have a profound impact on his exploration of humanity and society, expressing absurdity and rebellion. The land of his birth, Algeria, was also a source of inspiration. Camus wrote, “I loved passionately the land of my birth. I scooped up everything I was from it.” and ‘If I lost my land, I would be worth nothing.’ The ‘sunshine’ in The Stranger might not have been possible without Algeria.
Morceau in The Stranger
The plot of The Stranger
Maursou, a young man working in the office of a shipbroker in Algiers, receives a telegram one day that his mother, who is in a nursing home in Marango, has died, and he goes to attend the funeral. He meets up with Marie, a former work colleague, and they watch a delightful movie, swim in the sea, and make love. Knowing few people, he befriends Léon, who lives in the same apartment building, and joins Léon’s plan to harass his former lover. A few days later, he goes to the beach with Léon and encounters a group of Arabs who have been following them, among them the brother of Léon’s former lover. A fight breaks out and ends with Léon being wounded, but Maurice feels frustrated and goes to a cool spring, where he meets an Arab who accidentally stabs Léon, and Maurice unwittingly pulls the trigger of his pistol because of the intense light of the knife he pulls out.
This is part one of the story, and in part two, Morceau is put on trial for the murder, and ultimately convicted for not shedding a tear despite his mother’s death, and the story ends.
Tears and sunshine
Morceau is a man who refuses to lie. The lie here is not simply the opposite of the truth, but also the exaggerated expression of emotion. In the preface to The Stranger, Camus describes Morceau as follows.
“He refuses to tell a lie. To lie is not merely to say something that is not there; it means to say more than is actually there, especially when it comes to the human heart, to say more than one feels. Yet this is something we all do every day to make our lives simpler.”
There are two words to describe Morceau. The first is ‘tears’. Her mother’s friend cried because her mother died, the old Salamano in the next room cried because the dog they lived with was gone, and Marie, who told her she could marry someone she didn’t love and still be in love, cried in front of the prosecutor who wanted to convict her, but she refused, thinking it was an exaggeration of life. Tears, to him, are just false emotions that cause him to feel even greater grief in order to express his sorrow, which is why, after his mother dies and her funeral, he says
“Then I thought to myself, another Sunday has passed, my mother’s funeral is over, and tomorrow I will have to start working again, so nothing has changed after all.”
Also, when asked if his lover loved him, Meursault says
“I replied that it didn’t mean anything, but that I didn’t feel like I was in love with her. Marie had a sad look on her face.”
As we can see from these words, her mother’s death has only changed her, like a sadness that can’t be grasped; love is invisible, unspoken, and unknowable. This is her honesty, and therefore, tears of sadness are not important to her.
The second important word is “sunshine.” In “The Stranger,” sunshine plays a very important role. Someone once summarized the work in one line: “It’s a story about a man who killed a man because of the sunshine.” Sunshine is an important element in the work.
“The sun rose a little higher in the sky. The sky was already full of sunlight, which began to fall heavily on the ground, the heat rising rapidly. All around me I could see the fields, dazzling with sunlight, but the light pouring down from the sky was unbearable.”
Sunlight appears in every important scene: when Morceau buries his mother, when he receives the pistol from Remont, and when he kills the Arab. These scenes evoke a strong sense of the Mediterranean sun, and sunlight symbolizes the “present” and “substance” of the work. This is also evident in the later scenes of Meursault’s imprisonment, where he is shown facing the bars and longing for sunlight. In addition to sunlight, he also longs for things he can touch.
“When I was first imprisoned, the most painful thing for me was to think of myself as a free person. For example, going to the beach and having the urge to get in the water, the sound of the first waves hitting the grass under my feet, the feel of being underwater, and the sense of freedom I felt. As I walked out of the tribunal and went to my car, I felt for a very brief moment the smell and light of a summer evening.”
In addition, shortly before his death, Morceau says the following.
“At that moment, at the far end of the night, the sound of a ship’s bell rang out, announcing my departure into a world that was now to be forever separated from me.”
Even when the priest offers to pray for his soul, for the first time in his life, Mussorgsson becomes angry, saying
“You live like a dead man, you have no conviction that you are even alive. I may be a bare fist to you, but I have conviction, conviction of myself, conviction of everything.”
Morceau doesn’t have the same idea of death that most people do, either – a reflection of Camus’s rejection of God and religion – for him, it’s all over when you die. For him, the things he can touch, the things he can see, are the most important, and the sunlight is the only thing that reminds him that he’s living in the present.
In the end, Morceau is a man who doesn’t fake his emotions, as tears and sunshine would suggest, and who lives in the present moment.
Morceau the stranger
So why does Morceau become a “stranger”? Abstract things like emotions, God, grief, morality, and religion don’t matter to him. Up until his trial, he has acted according to his own natural reasoning, but at the trial, his every action is subject to interpretation. From this point on, Morceau becomes a “stranger,” incomprehensible to neither the judge nor the lawyers.
Camus once said, “The meaning of this book lies precisely in the parallelism between the first and second parts” (“Writer’s Notebook II”). In Part I, Morceau’s actions are described without meaning, but in Part II, they are ‘interpreted’. The court interprets Morceau’s failure to cry at his mother’s funeral as indifference, and his lack of remorse after committing murder as a lack of moral principles. At the same time, he is sentenced to death on the grounds that he is an intelligent human being who knows what he is doing, and therefore has no mitigating circumstances; however, he is, in the words of the author, a character who “speaks less” throughout the novel, answering questions that life, or others, pose to him.
The first and second parts of “The Stranger” could be said to be two different worlds. Based on the murder, they are divided into a world of innocent life and a world of life after committing a sin. Also, while part 1 is the world of the common people, part 2 is the world of trials and rhetoric. In these two worlds, different languages are used. For example, the word “relation” is used in the first world to mean a logical relationship based on the natural order of things, but in the second world it means a relationship based on the artificial, mathematical logic of words. In the face of these worlds, Morceaux is unwilling to lie, and his indifference leads him to keep his mouth shut. No one understands him, and in the end, he becomes an alienated “stranger,” marginalized even in his own court.
Camus’s thinking
Absurdity
Camus’ oeuvre is divided into three stages. The Stranger, along with The Myth of the Sisyphean, belongs to the first phase, the absurd, while the third phase was never completed due to his death.
Camus effectively exposed absurdity through the use of free intertextuality, especially in the novel. Throughout Part II of The Stranger, the criticism of the judiciary and the prison world continues. This criticism is done in both a realist way (the prison, the visiting room, the prisoners’ reactions, etc.) and a satirical way (the confrontation between the reality experienced in part one and the rhetorical interpretation the prosecutor places on that experience). The mechanics of the justice system reveal its absurdity and subjectivism, the abuse of logic and the desire to present a systematic and coherent explanation in a world where only chance reigns, in which the individual is denied and forgotten. The justice system of the time picks out the real murderers with sufficient suspicion and puts them on trial, but in the human world, this becomes impossible because trials are inevitably based on appearances. The criticism of such trials is linked to the Gospel’s statement, “Thou shalt not judge another,” which in turn is linked to the commandment, “Thou shalt not kill another. This is where Camus’s support for the abolition of the death penalty comes into play.
In this way, through the character of Monsieur, Camus uses a clear distinction between the first and second act and a variety of novelistic devices to capture the absurdities of society, especially the absurdities of the judicial system.
Existentialism
Existentialism is a philosophical and literary movement that emphasizes the importance of human freedom, responsibility, and agency as individuals. Notable authors include Franz Kafka, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir. During his lifetime, Camus denied that he was an existentialist, but his work is highly regarded as existentialist for its deep insights into human existence and its search for a new ethic in an absurd world. This is captured in Sartre’s book review.
“A work that reveals itself to be valuable by its own virtue, and does not strive to prove anything outdated.”
The Stranger doesn’t use any maximizing devices to portray its protagonist, and Morceau’s actions are described as dryly as they are. That’s why it “doesn’t try to prove anything.” The sentences in The Stranger are very self-contained. Sartre analyzes that the central argument of The Stranger is that Morceau lives in the present. Because Morceau lives in the present, neither the past nor the future is of much importance to him. This is an existential attitude to life. In response, Sartre writes
“Just as each moment of our life is an individual brilliance and a whole in itself, so each sentence is an individual brilliance and a whole in itself. I prefer the brilliance of the little fragments, each of which is a sensual delight, to a well-structured story. Absurdity In the same way that all human experiences are of equal value, all the sentences in The Stranger are of equal weight. Each sentence stands on its own and turns the others away.”
As can be seen from the above book review, Camus effectively presents Meursault as living in the present without falsehoods, using independent sentences in the present that do not rely on the past or the future. The fact that Meursault, an existentialist character, is presented through independent sentences means that the novel’s content and form are consistent. Sartre appreciated this.
In this way, The Stranger aligns with the existentialist philosophy that emphasizes human freedom and agency, and the character of Morceau becomes a new ethical paragon for readers.
Conclusion
Albert Camus’s The Stranger represents the third phase of Camus’s oeuvre, the absurd, and explores human alienation and the absurdity of society through the life of Morceau, who is sentenced to death for living in a state of insensitivity and not being understood by anyone. The relevance of this work to modern society is still great. I end by quoting Sartre, who already saw the value of this work.
“It is quite possible to discern in Camus’s dark and pure work the main characteristics of the French literature of the future: his work promises us a certain classic literature, a literature that gives no illusions but is full of faith in the greatness of humanity, passionate but restrained, harsh but without unnecessary violence.”
